6. The Head of Caesar
7. The Purple Wig
8. The Perishing of the Pendragons
9. The God of the Gongs
10. The Salad of Colonel Cray
11. The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
12. The Fairy Tale of Father Brown



ONE


The Absence of Mr Glass


THE consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist
and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front
at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows,
which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.
In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue-green dado:
for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness
not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed
that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry.
These things were there, in their place; but one felt that
they were never allowed out of their place. Luxury was there:
there stood upon a special table eight or ten boxes of the best cigars;
but they were built upon a plan so that the strongest were always
nearest the wall and the mildest nearest the window. A tantalus
containing three kinds of spirit, all of a liqueur excellence,